After placing the 1480 copies of the _Original Poetry_ in Mr. Stockdale's hands, Shelley naturally wished the same publisher of light literature to produce _St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian_,--a novel of which so much will be said in the next chapter of this volume, that it is enough in the present page to say the young author was at work upon it in the summer and autumn of 1810, and probably began to work upon it soon after sending the copy of _The Wandering Jew_ to John Ballantyne and Co. Enough has been said of the verses that, written by Shelley in 1809-10 (probably in the earlier half of 1810), may have been the first sketches and studies for _Queen Mab_. It is, however, well to refer again to the metrical performances that, engaging Shelley's attention in the autumn of 1810, were published by the Oxford printer and bookseller, J. Munday, in the middle of the November of that year, under the title of _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_. In a contemptuous notice of the _Victor and Cazire_ poems, the _British Critic_ (1811) spoke of the volumes as 'sentimental nonsense and very absurd tales of horror' in terms, that seem to dispose of Mr. D. F. MacCarthy's suggestion that the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_ may be a mere reproduction of the _Victor and Cazire_ poems, _minus_ the verses that might have brought the publisher into the Court of Chancery. In comparing Byron's story with Shelley's story, one is struck by the numerous resemblances and coincidences of the two careers. Even as Byron employed a country printer to produce his first volume of boyish verse, Shelley employed a country printer for the production of his first book of jingle. Even as the indiscretions of Byron's first book constrained him to suppress it, Shelley was forced to suppress his first thing of rhymes by fear of consequences. What was the year of Shelley's correspondence with Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), the correspondence, in which he impregnated her mind with sceptical thought, and so far disturbed her religious life that Mrs. Browne (Felicia's mother) wrote to Mr. Medwin the elder, begging him to use his influence with Shelley, so that he should desist from writing to the girl he had never seen? In the absence of dated documents, I answer this question with some hesitation by assigning the interchange of letters to 1810. There are reasons for giving a somewhat earlier date to the correspondence, and reasons for thinking the boy and girl were writing to one another even so late as the spring of 1811. But, speaking doubtfully, I regard the interchange of epistles as an affair of the spring and summer of 1810.